Uriah Heep has tampered little with their proven formula. Music is a much larger commitment than that.” It’s wrong for musicians to keep playing with a specific directive of hanging out for a few more years and collecting the bucks so they can buy farms and property. I’m a musician and the only thing I seem to be seeing around here are dollar signs. If people aren’t interested in the music, I’m not interested in them as people. There’s gonna have to be a lot of alterations around this group. I can’t relate to that situation, so I’m hoping for what has to be a major change in the next year. The emphasis has gone off music and onto big business. “Unfortunately, that’s not the prevalent attitude. “I could care less about the money,” he says. Hensley, for one, would like to forget about maintaining the bands’ commerciality and start upgrading their artistic stature. Their tours invariably sell out every city’s biggest hall and although their albums have penetrated the Top Ten only once with Uriah Heep Live, the last five of the band’s eight LPs have been gold. In the four years since their first album, Very ‘Eavy, Very ‘Umble, Uriah Heep’s hard work has paid off. Especially now that taxes in England are incredible. We’ve got to keep touring, it’s the only way to pay the bills. In the end, we usually take four weeks off every year. We have to release a record every six months. We tour six or eight months a year and the rest of the time is spent recording. Sickness, fatigue… it’s just a hazard of the business. Terrific.”īyron, on the other hand, can’t think of anything he’d rather do more than tour. So basically we were five nice little English boys touring around the country saying ‘yes please’ and ‘thank you’ 13 months a year. Our music isn’t so special that people would immediately prefer it over everything else.
It’s that way with most English rock & roll bands trying to break through to an American audience. “The press has never really accepted us, so we figured the only way to get anywhere was to keep playing. “We’ve been on the road since our first album,” Henley says, sighing. Whatever the mishap, everyone agrees that it was a direct result of Uriah Heep’s incessant touring schedule. The suspiciously cloudy details tend to substantiate the no-shock story. None has any idea whose fault the potentially fatal electric blast was, nor are there indications that they are taking any trouble to find out. He flipped out.” Road managers and band members – organist Ken Hensley, drummer Lee Kerslake and guitarist Mick Box fill out the lineup – all have an amorphous, memory of the incident. And then during the Dallas concert, he cracked. Emaciated, with thighs as thick as his wrists. “Gary had been really abusing himself mentally and physically,” said a friend. Some inside sources, including a promoter handling one of the canceled shows, privately maintained there was no shock at all.
“If he hadn’t been sick already,” Byron admits, “I guess we would have been able to finish out the tour.” According to lead singer David Byron, Thain had been seriously ill with borderline hepatitis as well as “completely exhausted” with road fatigue at the time. The jolt, which immediately ended a nationwide tour three dates from completion, now appears to be less than a major factor in the cancellation. I swear he looked like he’d done a deep-six.” Then he turned completely white and fell over on his face. The guy was riveted to the neck of his guitar, shaking violently. “He was just playing, then all of a sudden it was like he was having an epileptic fit.
promo man Pat Morris, one of the few who allegedly saw Uriah Heep bassist Gary Thain “seriously shocked” during a Dallas concert in mid-September. Los Angeles – “I thought the sum-bitch was dead,” said Warner Bros.
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